Community Council/Council election Q3 2010/Candidate declarations

1 Candidates for Q3 2010 Maemo Community Council elections
2 Candidate declarations

Candidates for Q3 2010 Maemo Community Council elections

The following candidates have been nominated for the Maemo Community Council.

Candidate declarations

Andrea Grandi

My name is Andrea Grandi, from Italy. Most of you probably already know me, but I'll introduce myself for people who joined later.

I'm a computer science student at Università degli Studi di Firenze and I've worked in the past as software developer for some companies. I also lead the Linux user group of my city (PtLUG), and for this reason my programming interests are directed to opensource development.

Working for PtLUG I've also gained a lot of experience about how to relate to a community and how to organize events.

Past and present in Maemo Community

I joined the Maemo Community since the first Maemo device was out (Nokia 770) and I've been always so excited for being able to contribute to this project.

In the past I've attended at both Maemo Summit doing a short talk. During last summer I collaborated with PyMaemo team during a stage at Igalia and at the moment I'm developing a couple of applications using Python and Qt.

Areas where I could help in the council

In the Maemo Council I could help mainly for two things. First of all I could help for the organization of the events. Finding a strategic place to organize an event and selecting interesting contents to attract more people is not an easy task. I think that there are still some areas where we can work better to give to the Community a better Summit.

Being a developer too I think I could help improving tools that Maemo developers use. For example a lot of work could be done to improve the Maemo Garage (did you notice that main Maemo project have their code in Gitorius, mailing list on Maemo Garage, website on another hosting service etc...... ?!).

What I would like to do in the Council

Maemo(MeeGo) Summit organization: as I already said, there are some areas that we could improve and I'm going to work in this direction.
Promoting developers contests: a nice way to attract developers is challenging them. We could organize a contest and I'm sure that a lot of interesting applications could be created by community.
Improving the "getting started" part of all areas: I've noticed that for a new developers or users has never been easy to find where to start from. I think that a lot could be done to improve this.

Of course I've also other ideas for the Community, but first of all let's see how this Maemo+Moblin fusion will evolve. We are no more just "Maemo" now, we are a larger community so I think it's better to start as soon as possible working together to create the best community ever :)

Tim Samoff

It's funny to think that I've been laying low in such a way that many people within the Maemo Community might not know me. For my absence, I apologize -- although, my absence has not been without just cause. In any case, I feel like my life is coming back into a place where I might be able to lend a hand -- and a voice -- in much more of a deliberate capacity.

That being said, I would like to nominate myself (again) for this esteemed position within our amazing community of software rebels... Even so, this is not to say that I wouldn't like some of the newer blood to demolish me in the elections. But, for that to happen, we need the newer blood to nominate themselves -- or nominate others -- and make this an important election... Not just one that was left by the wayside.

These are important times for our community. Not only are we on the verge of another community conference, but the community dynamic and infrastructure is about to take a dramatic shift. With the advent of Meego, we, as a community, must forge a path in which the community (members new and old) have a say in the future of our development framework and operating system. Enough said.

I am not going to make my nomination a history of what I have contributed to the community. There are plenty of forum threads, blog posts, etc. to prove my worth. But, this is the forum, I think, to stress the importance of having a Community Council and of remaining diligent in expressing out beliefs, our ideals, and our desires to Nokia and Intel.

We are the voice. That's what Maemo was built upon. Don't let laziness, shyness, or some sort of self-imposed form of self-motivation get in your way.

This is my self-nomination. But, I'm an old hand. Nominate yourself and become a pivotal force in Maemo and Meego.

Rüdiger Schiller

In the first place, I nominated myself to encourage more former or active council members to volunteer.

In the 2nd, I offer my heart and my soul to stand a ground for developers who cannot or do not want to do it (also for the whole community but I think the developers come a bit short regarding the masses of users in the commmunity). I like doing the background work (heavy lifting) as well as I like to communicate and fight for opinions, sometimes even if it is only for the better good and not my own opinion. I like to question behavior and reflect situations differently as other people. I think I may do a good job in supporting the old council members and give some fresh air to the dungeons down below and light up the secret pathes to nokia's embassy. (I was asked to not declare war...) May you support my self nomination? Let a vote decide!

Cosimo Kroll

You can also watch a video about me here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYdRMBwjKfM

Many of you know me already from a maemo summit or another event like the Linux Tag or my own event, the mobile freidae.

For those who don't know me: my real name is Cosimo Jeremy Kroll. My nickname is coming from the initial letters of my names spoken in German (C J K = zeh jot kah, in English that would be see djay kay). I'm 21 years young and therefore full of energy.

I have a long history regarding mobile devices and Linux in general. As far as I remember I installed my first Linux with 10 years on a 33mhz PC ("boostable" to 66mhz). After coming to maemo with the Nokia N810 I knew that this operating system will be my/the future of mobile devices.

I'm kind of tech freak, for example I'm building at the moment the biggest, private multitouch table in Germany.

Currently I'm spending my free time on my own site http://meetmeego.org. We provide news, videos and tutorials around maemo and MeeGo. Speaking of videos, most of you probably know also my youtube channel http://youtube.com/zehjotkah where I post video reviews and tutorials around the N900 and future devices.

We are also organizing the mobile fridae berlin, which takes place one time per month at the c-base. (http://mobilefreidae.org). It is very successful and thanks to our contacts we have speakers from Nokia, Qt and Neofonie (which are making the WeTab) for example.

Organizing the mobile freidae and everything around meetmeego.org, taught me how to organize things.

My aim for the next six month is to keep the maemo community on talk.maemo.org alive, which won't be a simple task. There is no denying that many will move on to new devices and spend most of their time on meego.com. But there are so many (on t.m.o still not active) N900 users outside, who maybe will need help one day. Therefore I plan to create different new positions and functions around t.m.o. One of the firsts things will be a treasurer and a community PayPal account. Then it would be possible to donate money to that account which will be (for example) spend then to the "developer of the month". The community account will be also useful for future coding competitions like kojacker and I achieved some month ago. These should be organized every six month.

There are also other positions to be filled, like someone who takes care of the wiki. These time-intensive positions should be rewarded by Nokia with for example new devices and T-Shirts for example. This is possible as seen on the flights and accommodation to the MeeGo conference for the six winners of the coding competition.

Also we need more moderators from different timezones. Sometimes a thread wasn't moderated because the responsible moderator simply had to work in that moment.

Of course there is also time to be spend on the meego.com forums, as MeeGo will be the future of many devices in our hands. This council, elected for the next six month is responsible regarding the future merge or the future continuation as two entities of t.m.o and meego.com I think both communities should NOT merge because then there would be a similar "disaster" as it was with the N810 and N800 - the users would feel abandoned, and that should not be the case!

Thanks for your time.

Andrew Flegg

As with Tim, I'm an old hand and the current chair of the council. The last 6 months have been interesting and challenging for the community, coming as they did after the announcement of the merger of Moblin and Maemo teams at Intel and Nokia and to form MeeGo.

The thing I've learned is that Nokia's planning didn't seem to extend to the community and Intel (not having much of a Moblin community) didn't think much of it either. This has resulted in fear, uncertainty and doubt. The new MeeGo community is also making wholly new mistakes, for which we need to bring our extensive experience of maemo.org and the Maemo Community to bear; for example, the ability of community packages to depend on each other. It's also entirely unclear whether meego.com should be the home for MeeGo device discussions, let alone Harmattan or MeeGo-Harmattan HE on N900.

The MeeGo community is forming, however the Maemo community feels like it's stagnating. There are a few reasons for this, however the big one is that of fear & uncertainty, as I mentioned above. We all want a continual updates to our device's OS, a steady stream of enhancements and a vibrant ecosystem. What's unclear is the best way of achieving that:

Core MeeGo Handset port to N900
MeeGo-Harmattan port to N900
Maemo 5 Community SSU

Certainly in the short term, the last one is the easiest to achieve and can even provide benefits whilst waiting for (hopefully) PR1.3. That's what I support MohammadAG's efforts in this area; and hope we can get some real traction there. Hopefully the other two will contribute to each other and they will become realistic day-to-day alternatives to Maemo 5. But they're not there yet.

The budget for maemo.org is being reduced and the number of hours contracted for the paid staff is decreasing. Nokia are also less interested in Maemo and its community. Therefore, if elected, I plan to:

Clarify the position of the paid team and what we can expect from them (a task which is currently underway[1])
Hold a referendum in this term, no later than February 2011 on the topic of whether the Community Council needs to continue for a future term, and have discussions about the governance of maemo.org.

Hopefully, by January a new device will be out and we will be able to see the effect of consumer-quality MeeGo devices on the Maemo community; and it'll be clearer how the MeeGo community is operating.

Since making the decision to run again (I was in the founding council, chaired the following council and am chair again now) we've had a set of new candidates come forward; so I revisited this decision. I think, however, some form of continuity would be useful at this critical time.

If you have any questions for me, please don't hesitate to ask. I also encourage people to come up with questions for the other candidates.

Stephen Gadsby

While I'm pleased to see enough community members have now stepped forward that the election can proceed and the full, five member council can be filled, I'd be happier still to see a larger pool of candidates during such an important time for this community. To that end, I add my own name to the candidate list, and I encourage others to please step forward.

The time period covered by this next council term promises to be an interesting one. I support the decision not to forcibly merge the maemo.org community into MeeGo. However, even without that, MeeGo already casts a large shadow over our community, and the impending release of a MeeGo (or at least, MeeGo-ish) handset by Nokia promises to draw away an as yet unknown, but potentially large, quantity of people, talent, and resources.

Communication will be key. The current council, and councils past, have established good communication channels, and MWKN has proven to be a wonderful asset. In the turbulent times ahead though, I see a need for even greater coordination and sharing of information.

There's widespread, and growing, anxiety in the community regarding MeeGo. What does MeeGo mean, offer, and not offer to owners of current devices? And what of the community members who choose to stay with Maemo and maemo.org? What can be done to best position Fremantle and Diablo, at a minimum, for continued community support and enhancement, and how can the maemo.org resources the upon which our community has come to rely be continued into the future?

It will be essential that the next council assist the community in disseminating the information we have, and finding answers to the questions that remain. More than technical skills, the next council will need communication skills and a willingness to seek answers. And yes, that's a direct hint to bears and others who fear they're insufficiently code-savvy to stand for election to the council.

I'll be doing my best to help.

Felipe Crochik

I don’t expect anybody to vote for me with so many good and well known candidates but I have had such a good experience with this community that I would like to get more involved with it.

All the community/open source experience I have I owe to this community. I am an independent software developer and started writing software long ago when the “new kids on the block” were talking about windows.

I own an n800 and couldn’t wait to get my hands on the n900 after I heard about it. I have to say that got disappointed but finding this community has made all the difference.

One common complaint I hear about maemo is the supposedly small number of applications. While I don’t agree this is necessary true, it is clear that maemo has failed to attract “commercial” applications. I don’t see why an “open platform” based on open source has necessary to scare off “commercial” applications. One common subject among consumers is how the n900 compares to android and the iphone – the applications available always end up being the most important maemo disadvantage. Also, how many times have you read about how bad/useless the “ovi” store is for maemo?

It is obvious that the hardware will not evolve but the software can. We may get a chance or two to update the OS with “plain vanilla meego” but eventually that will also stop. I believe that the ability to get new applications to be the most important aspect of keeping our devices/community alive. We must make sure that Qt and Qt Mobility packages will continue to evolve/exist on the n900, I would even say that we have to invest on getting the latest qt back ported to the Diablo as well – n800 owners are a big part of this community.

More important than my candidacy I would like to offer some questions for the candidates and future council:

Is meego a “suitable” replacement for the maemo community? We have debian but there is also the ubuntu community. All this assuming that at some point it will make sense to replace fremantle with some meego flavor.
Can we find sponsors for the maemo so we can continue to exist? Can’t we talk Nokia into making maemo the house for the new nokia “meego” devices? I am quite sure Nokia will also have a “meego by nokia community” of some sort.
Can we figure out some model where the device owners will contribute money so their devices don’t get obsolete? Anybody that had to pay for the device will probably not mind paying to get better/more software. Maybe bringing somehow the “ovi store for the n900” to the maemo community will be enough to justify maintaining it.
Unrelated but important: Security and Privacy. Shouldn’t this be an important issue? How can we just ignore all the current vulnerabilities?

My name is Felipe Crochik, I was born in Brazil and live in the U.S. I have created MyContacts, WakeOnLan, ported (and enhanced) Macuco and tried to help other developers with my experience.

If there is any room for a “fresh/green” candidate I believe my experience with “consumer software” development can be useful to the community as the “community experience” has been very useful to me.

I hope my ignorance will help bring some new arguments/ideas to the table. Please forgive me for being so “naive”.

Robin Burchell

First, in the interests for full disclosure, the primary reason I wasn't sure I wanted to stand was due to time. I don't have a huge amount of it thanks to work commitments currently keeping me fairly busy, and other commitments outside of work.

Once I start thinking about my outside commitments, though, I realise they're fairly well related to this anyway: occasional Qt patches/PR/stuff, keeping up with MeeGo/Maemo (a difficult task in itself nowdays), and the various bits and pieces of code I write or contribute to (see GitHub and gitorious for an overview of some of it if you don't know of me)

My primary agenda would be to try to help facilitate Maemo in the context of ongoing and future development, to try to ensure that application developers can smoothly and easily target Maemo as well as MeeGo (and whatever else) through the means of Qt and other technologies, as well as helping educate developers old and new.

This isn't something new: I've been working on it (with varying amounts of success) both in terms of helping individual developers with learning Qt, and other problems, as well as the MeeGo developer engagement project - which has, admittedly, due to my time constraints, regrettably been less successful so far.

Finally, I'd like to end my navel gazing, and thank Andrew for helping me to reconsider my position on not standing for election, by pointing out with his nomination mail just how important an issue this term (and indeed the last) have been, and how it would be a mistake to _not_ make my stand right now.

I am employed by Collabora Ltd. Amongst Collabora's clients is Nokia.

Kathy Smith

After a great deal of consideration, and a LOT of persuasion on this list, twitter, IRC and even the phone, I'd like to rescind my rejection and accept Texrat's nomination, if that's permitted.

I'm still very unconvinced about my usefulness to the Council, but since others seem to think I can be of value, I'm prepared to try my best if that's what people want.

Please understand, I have limited knowledge of modern business practices, though I did work for many years in organisations almost entirely run by volunteers, so have some idea how volunteer communities work. But I don't have the first clue of the modern 'business speak'.

Equally, I have no experience of coding - I can just about knock up a page of html, and that's my limit!

So what do I bring?

Enthusiasm a-plenty
Willingness to have a go - at most things, including technical stuff with a bit of support
Concern for the 'average bears' in community, which doesn't mean the outspoken angry people demanding stuff on principle, but people who're trying to get the best out of their device with limited tech skills.
People and communication skills - including presentation skills if you ever need them, and English language skills.
Commitment to bridging maemo and meego - and a determination that us bears of very little brain will still have our own corner in meego somewhere.

If any of that can be of use for the next 6 months, I'll stand.

Attila Csipa

It seems that it is becoming a tradition that most nominations turn up on the last day. I was almost getting worried that the dreaded alternative clauses of lack of interest might be invoked, but, just like last term, in the end it seems that there is a very good 'offer' to the community. My view of the importance of the next term have already been summarized here, but I would like to emphasize once more - barring the financials, it's up to the community where (and in what form) maemo.org will or will not go - and there is no better representative than the Community Council to have a legitimate representation. That's why I would like to see people with a can-do approach on the Council, trying to solve/deal with hot and not too pleasant topics (and I feel the next term will not be in short supply). Remember, anyone can rant, but it takes a special kind of talent to turn discontent into constructive action, and I'm glad the list of candidates is in no shortage of such folks. I must note that recently there were a lot of question of what a Council's role really is - something I wrote about before so I would really like if things like this get a bit more visibility during the candidate question/grilling part so these things become more apparent to people who only recently became eligible voters - the future Council won't be able to bring a new Flash 10 to our N900s any more or less than the current one can.

Personally - apart from responding to any 'routine' formal candidate questionnaires - I plan on blogging (as promised) a retrospection on what issues the current Council encountered, how it dealt with it and what was achieved (an example). I must say I thought quite a bit whether I should accept the nomination or not, considering my professional interests, but in the end I think that the community itself is the best judge to say whether what I do/did benefits it and if it requires my services for a second term or not.

Thus, to formally round the number of candidates to 10, I accept Randall's nomination. Also, as per Council nomination rules I'm stating that I'm currently working at Forum Nokia in a developer support/consultancy role.

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